The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

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In the mid-1950s, as the “automation revolution” swept America’s factories, Peter Drucker called on corporations to take responsibility for providing something essential to their workers’ fortunes, as well as their own: the training needed to master the new technology.

“Large companies in particular will have to become educational institutions,” Drucker wrote in Harper’s. “For the foreseeable future, there will simply not be enough new people with the new knowledge and skill required to fill the new jobs; and this will be true in all areas of the organization: rank and file, office work, technical and professional work, managerial work. On every level, adult education—largely on the job—will be needed.”

Students listen to instructor Jesus Hernandez as they continue their education on servicing air conditioners at the Air Conditioning, Refrigeration and Pipefitting Education Center in Opa Locka, Florida. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, doesn’t buy that view. He contends that one reason employers aren’t filling open slots—even when there’s a surplus of folks who are jobless—is that the pickings are almost too good. “This situation is not unlike that of teenagers who think they have many possible dates for the prom, putting off asking anyone in particular while considering their options,” he writes. “Employers, too, can be so dazzled by the choices that they wait too long to fill positions.”

In the end, Cappelli shows, those who do get hired are often overqualified—college graduates being brought on to perform tasks that really require only a high school degree.

At the same time, many others are shut out of work—even though they possess the attitude and general aptitude to be successful—for one reason: They lack prior experience (something those right out school almost never have). “The most important reason good individuals can’t get jobs . . . is that employers are defining job requirements in such a way that applicants need to have done the job already, a fact that dramatically narrows the supply of qualified applicants and unintentionally builds atrophy into the very heart of the workplace,” Cappelli writes.

Cappelli also declares it bunk that American workers aren’t smart enough to fill the vacancies that exist. He cites a number of statistics challenging the conventional wisdom that the U.S. public education system is a near-complete failure, while also questioning whether employers are actually fretting about the academic preparation of job applicants, as is widely depicted.

In any case, Cappelli adds, “to expect schools and students to guess what skills your company will need in the future is plain and simply bad business.” On this, Drucker clearly would have agreed. “When a subject becomes totally obsolete,” he noted, “we make it a required course.”

But if the so-called skills gap is largely a myth, why do jobs go begging in such a weak economy? Cappelli offers an intriguing answer: “the hiring process itself.”

Part of the trouble, he says, is that hiring has become dominated by computer software that makes it difficult “to identify skills that are not easily associated with credentials or experience.” The result, according to Cappelli: “Able applicants are tossed aside by capricious algorithms.”